


these inconvenient fireworks

by KiaraSayre



Category: The Penumbra Podcast
Genre: Dark Matters, F/F, Ice Cream
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:09:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21842725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KiaraSayre/pseuds/KiaraSayre
Summary: Sasha wondered, yet again, how cynical, spiky Juno Steel could have ended up with a secretary who was, it turned out, a hyperactive ray of fucking sunshine.
Relationships: Rita/Sasha Wire
Comments: 9
Kudos: 54
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	these inconvenient fireworks

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fieldofyellowdandelions](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fieldofyellowdandelions/gifts).



When Sasha heard that Juno Steel had somehow gotten himself a secretary who didn't murder him in his sleep, she imagined someone older, if not elderly; a cigarette-scraped voice and a fondness for whiskey; the kind of person who sprinkled every statement with "toots"es and "hun"s.

What she got instead was--well.

The first time she set eyes on Rita, she discovered that she did, in fact, have a type, and Rita was it. It had nothing to do with eye color, hair color, or really anything about her body; instead it was the sheer vibrancy Rita managed to cram into just saying "Juno Steel's office, this is _Rita_!"

But Sasha Wire didn't claw her way out of Old Town by falling for every nonsensically-employed secretary who came across her path. No, she got out of Old Town by furiously repressing every possible human emotion and channeling them instead into professional zeal.

So that's exactly what she did.

\--

Until.

Until a casefile came across her desk and one of the pictures had Juno Steel's dumb face in the background, and suddenly Sasha Wire's job became Fix Whatever Juno Fucked Up This Time. Juno was a lady with a foolproof talent for maximizing the trail of destruction left in his wake, from ancient Martian artifacts to the Hyperion City Election, and more importantly if he died Mick would probably get sad and it turned out there were some human emotions Sasha couldn't _quite_ repress.

So one thing led to another and Sasha ended up on a space station tracking down a group of interplanetary thieves (including, apparently, her childhood friend), and then _that_ led to another thing and she ended up more specifically in the control room of said space station staring down the barrel of her blaster at Juno's secretary.

"Oh," Rita said. The refraction of her glasses made her eyes look huge as she blinked up at Sasha, her fingers still clattering away at the station's system inputs. "Aren't you Mistah Steel's friend?"

Sasha's blaster didn't waver, but she experienced something she hadn't felt in a very long time: she felt thrown off. "You call him that even when he isn't around?"

"Well, yeah. What else am I gonna call him?"

"'Juno?'" Sasha suggested. "'My boss?' 'That idiot?'"

Rita tilted her head a bit, her eyes narrowing in a way that saw Sasha more clearly than she was comfortable with. "And you're really that mean to him when he ain't around, huh?"

She hit one last input with a flourish and the lights shuttered off like the universe was blinking out. 

Somewhere in the darkness, Sasha heard, "Gotta go, this was fun, talk to you later _byyyyyyyeeeee_!"

That was about when Sasha knew that she was well and truly fucked.

\--

So they stole a key. Whatever.

Sasha caught up with them again at their next target. Or, more accurately, at a small ice cream parlor across a Europan ice crevasse from the target, just within the bank's wireless access radius. Rita sat with her comm at a small table, accompanied by a woman Sasha's intel identified as Buddy Aurinko. Sasha maintained a safe distance and watched; Buddy ate nothing (food allergies, Sasha recalled from her file), but Rita savored a bowl of Cryogeyser Cookie Dough Blast with a relish that Sasha had never seen in any context. Sasha, who got through life by maintaining a thick separation between her and anyone or anything else, couldn't quite wrap her head around it. Not only the way Rita acted, but that there existed a kind of person who would make these choices at all.

She wondered what it would be like, to be that kind of person.

Eventually Buddy Aurinko stood up, either to use the restroom or more likely to steal something, but Sasha took full advantage of the opportunity and swiftly took her chair.

"Wow, that was _oh_ ," Rita said as she looked up. "Oh, uh, hi, Agent Wire...?"

Sasha tried to think of something to say, even as her intentions melted into banalities in her mind. Given how much fun Rita seemed to be having, the likelihood of her talking Juno out of any criminal activities was...low. 

Instead, the first thing that came to her mind also came from her lips: "What the hell is so good about that ice cream?"

Rita blinked again, then held out her spoon. "It's real good. You wanna try?"

Sasha stared at the spoon in horror. Eventually, she managed to say, "No."

"Oh," Rita said, and actually sounded a little disappointed. "Hey, I gotta ask you a question while you're here, in _The Dark That Matters Most_ there's this Dark Matters agent who's secretly working for Jovian Satellite Mining Triad because she's getting blackmailed by her clone that Dark Matters made of her, does Dark Matters really do that?"

Once again, Sasha found that she could only stare. "...no," she said, although, of course, she couldn't be certain.

"You sure?"

"What are you _doing_ here?" Sasha blurted, but then the blaster fire began and that drowned out Rita's response a bit.

\--

Which meant that Rita was a witness. At least, that's what Sasha told herself as she laid down cover fire to get Rita into the Dark Matters safehouse Sasha had secured for her stay on Europa, and witness to _what_ Sasha had no idea, but once they were safely inside and Sasha had made sure that her wounds from the firefight were only grazes, she found her ability to intimidate again.

"Tell me _everything_ ," she demanded, rounding on Rita.

Rita's chin quivered, but she crossed her arms and pressed her lips together firmly. The sharp head shake that she gave after that was superfluous.

"Stop messing around, Rita, it's getting dangerous out there and Juno's going to get himself killed!"

"Mistah Steel knows what he's doing!"

"That has literally never been the case."

"I'm not giving nobody up and you can't make me, not even if you torture me with thumbscrews or a Palladium Maiden or Dark Matters truth poisons or - "

"We don't have truth poisons," Sasha snapped.

"That's not what you'd be saying if you'd been dosed with one," Rita said smugly.

"That's not - " Sasha let out a sigh of frustration. "I'm trying to be helpful here, okay?"

"How's it supposed to be helpful to arrest me?" Rita demanded. "I've seen the shows, I know where this is going - "

"You're not under arrest," Sasha said. "I'm trying to stop all this before it gets that far, although your continued criminal activity isn't exactly helping!"

"It's like in _The Dark That Matters Most_ when the Venusian sulfuric acid smugglers get caught even though the agent turns out to be one of their long-lost sisters - "

"Okay, okay, stop." Sasha held up her hands, trying to hold back the torrent of words. "What even is that? _The Dark That Matters Most_?"

Rita gasped, her arms falling out of their petulant crossed position back down to her sides. "You've never seen it?"

"So it's a show?" Sasha said.

Rita whipped out her comm, which Sasha hadn't even realized she'd managed to salvage from the firefight. "We're watching it _right! now!_ and you don't get a say in it, you _have_ to see it, it's the best interplanetary spy slash criminal justice slash procedural slash space clone opera _ever_ and I just know you're gonna love it and Mistah Steel won't watch it with me anyway!"

Sasha could already feel the shape of her justification for this in her report: she'd spin it as _keeping the witness docile_ or something. But in the face of such bald enthusiasm, could Sasha really say no?

She wondered, yet again, how cynical, spiky Juno Steel could have ended up with a secretary who was, it turned out, a hyperactive ray of fucking sunshine.

Besides, whatever crime team Juno had joined up with was going to be looking for their hacker, and this seemed like the easiest way to track them down: to make them come to her. If it took a few hours, well, that could hardly hurt.

"It was the pilot," Sasha said, not even three minutes into episode one. "The pilot did it."

Rita gasped. "I _knew_ it was based on a true case! Tell me which one, was it amazing? Was it daring? Was it yours? Tell. Me. _Everything_."

"That model shuttle has an emergency release to disconnect the hatch hydraulics and open it from the inside," Sasha said. "So the pilot's lying about not being able to get out, so his alibi's fake, so he did it."

"Oh," Rita said, sounding a bit disappointed. "I mean, he _actually_ did it because he was the lover of the victim's husband, who was treated real wrong, but I guess that way of figuring it out works too."

Sasha felt, once again, wrong-footed. "Well, you - you wouldn't have been able to guess that this early, right? So that makes it a...a little secret clue, for people who know that about the shuttle."

"Oh!" Rita brightened. "You mean like the way you can see the pilot in the pictures hanging in the background of the husband's office three episodes earlier when that character was introduced?"

Sasha did a double-take back at the screen, which was paused on a scene in, indeed, the husband's office. Sure enough, there was a portrait of the pilot on the wall. "You noticed that?"

"Well, sure," Rita said. "The actor playing the pilot's too big a name to bring on for a bit part like that, so when I saw him in the background I just knew he was gonna come back and be someone important, you know?"

For most of her life, Sasha had really only been attracted to one thing: her job. It wasn't even that she had no time for relationships, but she had no interest. She knew that other people liked them, or at least felt like they needed them, and she had always had an intellectual notion that one day she might find someone that made her want one - the same way she might one day find a design that made her want a tattoo, or for some reason decide that she wanted to go suborbital skydiving. It could happen, but the chances were slim and it would, quite frankly, surprise her.

She was surprised now.

But then again, she never had been able to resist a mystery, and what was going on in Rita's head - that definitely counted.

"Can I take you to dinner sometime?" Sasha said, and felt the emotion of a wince without letting her face betray it. Even the phrasing went against all her Dark Matters training - questions left room for undesirable answers, while a short, declarative sentence could hide a multitude of sins.

"Oh," Rita said. "You mean - you don't like the show?"

"I mean - along with the show," Sasha said.

"Oh?" Rita said, then blushed. " _Oh_." She glanced at the comm. "Can we just finish this episode first?"

Rita gasped at every revelation, even though she already knew how it ended; like even though it wasn't new to her it was no less exciting, and even known things could be the best kind of surprise. 

To Sasha's shock, she really liked the episode, and they ended up watching three more.


End file.
